


Don't Blow It

by CrackleTack



Category: Farscape
Genre: Episode: s04e13 Terra Firma, Family Issues, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:47:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23999230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrackleTack/pseuds/CrackleTack
Summary: On Earth during Terra Firma, John is feeling dislocated. He and his dad try to have a conversation, and lose a lot in translation.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	Don't Blow It

_There's a starman waiting in the sky_  
 _He'd like to come and meet us_  
 _But he thinks he'd blow our minds_  
David Bowie - Starman

* * *

I used to have a copy of Voyager's photo in my wallet, when I still had a wallet. When I still lived on Earth. When the farthest I'd ever been was the International Space Station and that seemed impossibly, beautifully remote. I used to look up and outward at a galaxy of possibilities with longing and awe. Now I'm back, from outer space, with that sad look upon my face, and all I see is how small Earth is. A Pale Blue Dot lost in a pixelated universe.

I stare at the old photograph, pulled from a box of mementos kept next to my mom's. I turn it over, finger the plastic film and paper that's wrinkled at the edges. The picture is still the same, grainy rays of light and a spec of blue that you could mistake for dust on the film if you didn't know it represented a mass of iron, oxygen and ego. It looks, from far away, like any other point on a star chart. The galactic equivalent of a gas station in the middle of no where. 

I don't know when Earth became just another planet. A name, a place. A fragile ball of water and rock and radio transmissions with a pit stop market to barter in, and people whos' best defense is their insignificance to the universe at large. It's my mother country but it's not home anymore, and everything seems so much smaller. The problems, and the people. Even dad. 

Which is funny because he was always the biggest thing in my life. He was the image I could never outrun, the standard by which I was judged. He was the man of the house, the astronaut, the shining example of a generation of pilots who flew to the moon because they didn't believe it was impossible. His life was the gravity well that we all circled, for better and for worse. When he stepped off the shuttle after months in space he waved for the cameras, and smiled at the applause. Jack loved space but he loved being a hero too. 

I'm not a hero. I don't know what I am. 

I stand here, in the house I grew up in, looking at mementos and family portraits over the stairs and it's just a static wall of heads. Neat little squares of glass and polyethylene, like wanted beacons of the past. I brush my fingers against plastic and the solidity is strange. Part of me thinks it should blink and fritz like a Peacekeeper telemission because that's become normal, and everything that should be normal looks unreal.

I feel like E.T and any minute Earth is going to break out the Hazmat suits while I lie in a white plastic bubble just trying to breath. But everyone down here keeps looking at me like I’m Flash Gordon. The magazines are full of Amazing Stories about the American who went into the Deepest Darkest Space and taught all the savage aliens about real civilization through a strategic use of shirt ripping. 

When I think about shirt ripping I think of a gritty stone alter, knives, nails, burning oil. I think about unwelcome hands I just can't frelling get off me because nothing is working right inside. I think about a shivering heat, one legged narcotics crawling up walls, and words being milked out of me like frelling semen. I think about wanting to cry with eyes that are drugged as dry as Arnesk's magnetic summer. 

My brains been stirred, punched, flipped and turned inside out so many times that you'd think one more frell wouldn't matter, but Grayza was different. I don't know why it feels like she devastated something more inalienable then my mind, but it does. Everything I survived left marks that lingered like Scorpy on acid, but I always got out in the end and I can’t get out of my own body. It's perpetual entrapment; a cell I can’t escape. Now every time someone gets close my arms go limp and my spine locks up and I feel like she's taken over the prison all over again.

It helps that I haven't had to do much on Earth. No crowds or tours. No trips to DC, or South America. I'm just hanging out like hair in a biscuit. Dad's been keeping me close to home. I go from IASA's air field to Jack's house and back, and everywhere I go the secret service are sure to follow. I think Granny has seen more of Earth then I have. I do the interviews he schedules, but I don't say much. Which is frustrating the suits and worrying dad. He doesn't know what to do with the quiet. 

That isn't to say people haven't been reaching out. I'm getting the Letterman list every morning. DK wasn't kidding about lunch with the president. Dad's been fielding calls ever since I made a wormhole whoops and stumbled back into the old neighborhood. Most of them are what you'd expect, others aren't so benign. 

Case in point. I can hear Jack yelling now. So I drop my old Voyager photo and stuff it in the book I've been thumbing, then wander downstairs.

His office door is open, so I lean against the frame and play I Spy. Jack's office still looks like something out of Kubrick's vision of the future, full of nostalgia for the nineteen sixties' idea of space flight. Green carpet, wood backed easy chair, an old Commodore PET computer set on a shelf with old Shuttle blue prints, and photographs of the flag on the moon. Dad's standing next to his desk using his tough guy voice and yelling into the phone.

“Look I don't care. You tell Dr. Patton that my son isn't a study subject!” He hangs up. Practically slams the phone back in its plastic cradle, then braces his arms on his desk and hangs his head like it weighs a drakik.

“Stanford? or Columbia?” I ask from the doorway.

He looks up, a picture of surprise. Guess he didn't know I was listening. He looks caught and a little embarrassed. 

These are the calls he doesn't want me to know about. The P.H.Ds who are smart enough to ask tough questions and are less interested in Hetch Drives and biology then in what four cycles in space living with aliens does to the human mind. The ones that think humanity is where you're born and who you marry and want to know if I still qualify for the species. Or the ones who've already decided that proving Earth isn't the center of the universe is a crime against humanity and they want to tear me apart on television until everyone else agrees. 

Who knew I'd grow up to be Galileo. Come for the science, stay for the inquisition and house arrest.

“It was Berkley, actually.” Jack finally says, searching my face. I nod. It's about all I've got in me to give him right now.

“Well, thanks. For the insulation.”

“You don't have to talk to anyone you don't want to, son.”

“But you wish I'd talk to you,” I finish for him. 

He shrugs. “Every father wants that.” 

Which is funny, because we were never good at talking. Not when mom was alive. Not even when I joined the space program. If we weren't fighting we were just talking past each other. Same language, utter vacuum of understanding. I've pieced together more substance and meaning from Einstein and twisted old leather face than my dad sometimes. 

He's trying to do the right thing, in his way. Jack's been saying no a lot for me since we came down to Earth, which I appreciate, but he's said yes on my behalf almost as much. 

“Right. I'll try not to get a big head, just 'cause I went to space.” It's a joke, except that it's on him as much as me. “Beer?” I ask.

Jack looks confused, but he nods and puts on that smile he's started wearing. The one that looks like it's halfway to heartbreak and he doesn't know what to do with me. Me either, dad.

I leave him standing in his office and go to the kitchen, pick a couple of beers out of the fridge and head outside. I look at the sky. Appreciate the color and the novelty of atmosphere, blink a little at how bleached everything is down here.

I don't have the guts to tell dad that the son he mourned years ago might as well have died, because he's never coming back. It's cruel being here. I know that. I wish I hadn't put any of us in this position, and when I look at him and see him searching my face for the kid he lost, I don't know how to say, “I'm sorry I lived.”

So I sit on my dad's back porch, drinking his beer and trying to say all the right things when I don’t remember the script anymore. Willie Nelson is crooning “You Are My Sunshine” on the radio, and I wonder why all of Earth's love songs sound like threats.

Jack comes out onto the porch, takes a seat and a beer, and looks at me while I stare up at the sky trying to see Moya in the blue haze.

He's been wrapped up in the flush of first contact as much as anyone, but I think the calls from Psych Departments are starting to alarm him. One thing I've got in my favor is that Jack has never thought much of the soft sciences. As far as he’s concerned psychology is as pseudo as astrology, and he's very “keep it in the family” anyway. I don’t think he'd get behind anyone picking my brain before he did.

“Whatcha got there?” He finally breaks the silence, waving at the book I've still got in my hand. He says it the same way he did when I was five and building rockets out of mud in the backyard. I have a sudden urge to quote Hamlet and wave the book at him saying “wooooords,” but this isn’t Moya and dad never laughed at the absurd. So I hand him the book.

“Ishmael huh? You know your mother loved this book.” 

“It's for Chiana,” I say, cutting off that jaunt to the past. I don't want to talk about mom.

“The grey one?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Huh,” Jack smiles, like he's trying to share a joke. “She didn’t strike me as the reading type.” 

“Well, people will surprise you,” I mutter, because it's either that or ask what type he does think she is and start a real fight. Dad, as usual, doesn't get the memo.

“You know I never thought I'd say this, but for an alien race those Nebari sound real straight-laced.”

“They're just people.”

“Sure, who drug their own citizens!” Jack shakes his head “hard to imagine.”

I give him a sideways look. “And if Earth had that technology what would we do with it?”

It's the wrong thing to say. Jack looks like he's ready to make a speech that will start with 'that's not fair' and end on issues of access, and one nation's high ground over others. Which wasn't the point.

“Can we talk about something else?” I ask, rubbing my eyes.

“Sure.” He stops, and looks like he's searching for something to say. Finally he says, “how about about you?”

“What about me?” I ask, cautious, preflight checking the conversational trajectory.

“Well, we haven't talked much about what it was all like for you.”

And god there it is. Dad taking the leap and rocketing into space where one crack in the helmet will kill him in thirty frelling seconds. 

“You know what it was like Dad. Strange, exotic, alien. Lots of goo and tentacles and worms for toothbrushes.”

“Yeah,” he nods and he's giving me a real funny look. It's one I don't know. Or don't remember. Maybe that call from Berkley got to him more then I thought. “But, that's not really about you.” He takes a deep breath. “I'd really like to know what...” and he breaks off, looking frustrated.

“Let's not, and say we did,” I mutter, to save us both from where this is going. Then I try to wash the dry feeling out of my mouth with the beer. The taste is strange. I keep thinking it should be sweeter, more like Fellip and less like ass.

“Isn't there anything you want to tell me?” Jack asks.

And that's tough to answer because I do and I don't, and that question would be a lot easier to ignore if he sounded angry, but he's not. He sounds desperate. Frell, he's talking to me the way he talked to mom in the hospital, like if he spoke too loud it would scare her life away one day sooner.

I sigh.

The problem with bluffing for your life is that it's exponential. You have to keep it up. You can lie without ever saying anything false but eventually you've gotta give them something real or it all falls apart, and the more truth you tell them the more dangerous your situation gets.

So I sit here trying to think my way around dad like I think around Holt and commandos and bounty hunters and every weird ass brain sucker in the universe. I know I've gotta give him something or, like the suits, he'll eventually try and take it. I finger the spine of the book, rubbing a thumb over the I in Ishmael. 

The worst part is, he's not wrong. I've got a galaxy of things I never want to tell Jack, and couldn't if I tried. Things like how it feels when your brain is stripped like someone took turpentine to your grey matter. Things like John Crichton's body count. Things that I never want to touch Earth. Other things though...

“Sometimes.” I fidget, stop myself, then start again. “Sometimes, it would be nice to have a human perspective on things.” I take a breath and keep going. “Microbes can only translate so much. There's always stuff that gets lost in translation, and it's hard to explain why things matters to me, sometimes. I'm just too alien.”

“What sort of things?" Jack asks.

Grayza's hands on my face. That skin crawling sensation that makes me want to hurl as it rides the light fantastic in my pants, with a body that's on a totally different program and didn't get the frelling memo. Or the frelling was the memo. Then I need a fat sniff of Laka and a bath. In my nightmares the sound of popping buttons has joined the chorus of screams and skewered eyeballs. 

The worst part was when it felt good, but she made it hurt too when she had a point to make. That knife wasn't for show. I have marks down there now and if I ever have sex again, I'll have to explain them. Every time I remember that I shrivel at the frelling thought. 

I want to believe that if what happened at the dig on Arnesk is going to matter anywhere it will be here, on Earth, my place of origin. But as much as I want it to matter I'm also afraid that it won't. I mumble, more to myself then Jack. “Is he the invisible man, or a real boy?”

Jack frowns. I take a drink.

“You know, Sebaceans don't have a word for compassion?” I finally say. Jack's giving me the full power of his attention but I can't look at him while I say this. “They feel it, they know what it is, but there's no word for it in their language. So they talk around it. If they talk about it at all.”

“Huh.”

I'm so close to telling him, I can feel it clogging my throat.

“I don’t know if they have a word for rape either.” 

Jack sucks in a breath. I stare at the peeling label on my beer bottle.

“And I've never heard the Luxan equivalent,” I continue, thinking of D'argo's blank face and the indulgent disbelief when he said “John, everybody knows!” like Grayza was some illicit dorm room frell that made it around the phrat house gossip before we even got our pants back on. Maybe Luxans never say no. Maybe they're always up for up it no matter what. Or maybe he really does think Heppel oil is a myth.

I clear my throat, try to get my head back on straight in the here and now. 

“Uh, Nebari are all about suppression so for all I know they've blacklisted most of their own dictionary, and after four microts of listening to Rygel never mind four cycles I honestly couldn't tell you if all Hynerians are narcissistic gas bags or if he's just a particularly clueless bastard.” 

I don't tell him that linguistical divides aside Chiana knows exactly what rape is, because we can prod my open wounds but he won't get hers. For all I know she really doesn't have a word for it, and that's ok. We've always been ok swimming in the dark together, her and me.

As for the Peacekeepers, I honestly don't know what they think of it. For all the talk with Aeryn about recreation and sex and the illegality of romance in the ranks, it just never came up before. It must happen, Grayza proved that, but I don't know if it would it make easier or harder if they have a word for it. So its Schrodinger's question, and as long it stays unanswered I don’t have to know which is worse. I don't have to know, if I ever told Aeryn what Grazya did, if it would mean nothing or everything. 

Maybe I just want one thing to be sacrosanct to them because if it isn't, the only being I know on that side of the galaxy who knows the damn word “rape” is Scorpius, and that is not a slope I'm going to start slipping down.

I just wonder, sometimes, if I stood in Moya's hanger and screamed 'rape' at the top of my lungs would any of them have a clue what I was saying? Or would it just be more gibberish, like Linebackers and Looney Tunes?

I screw up my courage and look at Dad's face. He's horrified. He looks like he doesn't know whether to call Holt and put the military on alert, or blow a gasket. It's the same look I got when I was eighteen and smashed a T-Bird in a drag race. A special look reserved for injured antique cars and me.

“Don't worry,” I say. “It wasn’t anyone you've met.”

“Did you?” Jack doesn't finish, but he doesn't need to. It's in his face. God, he thinks I did it. He thinks I raped someone. 

“No.” It sounds ragged when I say it. I look him in the eye. I wait for him to think of the alternative. He doesn't. 

I close my eyes.

It shouldn't be a shock. This is Earth, frell it's Florida, and in Jack Crichton's universe of Top Gun aviation and rosy cheeked Rockwell paintings men don't get raped. Certainly not his son. Men want to frell every woman with two legs. Men rape women, not the other way around. Inadequate, cruel men, sure, because Jack's a good old boy and if he ever ended up on a jury he send the bastards that “had a good time” with Chiana to the frelling noose. Or he'd take them out back and show them his own justice with a baseball bat, but not for me. 

I'm a guy. He can't conceive of me in Chiana's place. Maybe a cycle ago, before Grayza, that would just be one more time we got our wires crossed, but I know what it feels like being on the other end of that word now and I can't shrug this off. It's stuck on me like oil, slick and sticky.

I look at my dad, and I wonder, would he actually be more comfortable with me as a nefarious outlaw, then a frelling casualty? A hysterical part of my brain wonders if the galactic gossip of John Crichton pillaging his way across the Territories somehow made it to Earth before I did. It's almost funny. 

Of course now that I've told Jack it wasn't me, he's gone from panicking about how to handle his son confessing to criminal assault to thinking we're just having a talk about some distant sociological divide between Earth and the rest of the universe. He's talking about the linguists he's tapped for the extraterrestrial study program and what the biologists at IASA have been doing with the microbe samples, and isn't it all so fascinating. The question of rape is something he's already safely filed into space exploration, and I die a little inside. 

I get up, take the book and leave the beer and say, “I need to change.”

Jack stops in the middle of what he was saying, looking taken aback. “What? For what?” 

“I'm going up to Moya for bit.”

“Oh.” He frowns. “Is everything all right?” 

“Yeah. She needs just some maintenance.” I lie and then, because I still feel like I owe him something, I add some of the truth, “and I'm tired. I sleep better up there. D'argos been fussing about that and when he gets in snit it lasts for days.”

If we're lucky. He once went on a mother hening bender for a monen and Pip and I were this close to shooting his Tenka's off from all the Tender Loving Care. I really haven't been sleeping much though. Funny how days and nights will frell up your spatial rhythm. The sounds don't help either, traffic and sirens and seagulls and people. Earth is noisy, and I miss the silence of space and Moya's humming.

“Well stay here.” Jack stands, not having it of course. Just like dad. “I call Holt and cancel the--”

“It's captain's orders, Dad.” I drop the title and Jack stops mid denial.

Jack may be pretending I'm here to stay until reality aligns with his demands, but he used to be air force, and rank is something he believes in. If I tell him I'm leaving because I can't stand being here any longer and have to get out of his house, than this heart-to-heart is gonna drag into real painful frelling territory and I am too tired to argue. If he thinks it's D'argo's orders than he'll respect that, even if he doesn't like it or agree with it. Because he's trying so damn hard to be the first contact guy that everyone needs right now.

D'argo hasn't told me to do anything of course, but he'll back me up if anyone asks. Even if he turns my ears red about it later. It's better then sitting here and listening Dad's voice get harder and louder the farther away we get from the universe he knows.

He's trying so hard it hurts, but I can't make Earth live up to my hopes anymore then Jack can turn back the clock and make me Earth bound again. 

“Sorry,” I say, apologizing for all the mistakes, and all the things I can't say, and all the things I can't hear, and all the things that can't be. 

Then I leave Jack sitting on his porch.


End file.
